An essential element of historical fiction is that it is set in the past and pays attention to the manners, social conditions and other details of the period depicted.[1] Authors also frequently choose to explore notable historical figures in these settings, allowing readers to better understand how these individuals might have responded to their environments. Some subgenres such as alternate history and historical fantasy insert speculative or ahistorical elements into a novel.

Works of historical fiction are sometimes criticized for lack of authenticity because of readerly or genre expectations for accurate period details. This tension between historical authenticity, or historicity, and fiction frequently becomes a point of comment for readers and popular critics, while scholarly criticism frequently goes beyond this commentary, investigating the genre for its other thematic and critical interests.

Definitions differ as to what constitutes a historical novel. On the one hand The Historical Novel Society defines the genre as works "written at least fifty years after the events described",[2] whilst on the other hand critic Sarah Johnson delineates such novels as "set before the middle of the last [20th] century […] in which the author is writing from research rather than personal experience."[3] Then again Lynda Adamson, in her preface to the bibliographic reference work World Historical Fiction, states that while a "generally accepted definition" for the historical novel is a novel "about a time period at least 25 years before it was written", she also suggests that some people read novels written in the past, like those of Jane Austen (1775–1817), as if they were historical novels.[4]

Classical Greek novelists were also "very fond of writing novels about people and places of the past".[6]The Iliad has been described as historic fiction, since it treats historic events, although its genre is generally considered epic poetry.[7]The Tale of Genji (c. 1000 AD) is a fictionalized account of Japanese court life and its author asserted that her work could present a "fuller and therefore 'truer'" version of history.[8]

One of the earliest examples of the historical novel in Europe is La Princesse de Clèves, a French novel which was published anonymously in March 1678. It is regarded by many as the beginning of the modern tradition of the psychological novel, and as a great classic work. Its author is generally held to be Madame de La Fayette. The action takes place between October 1558 and November 1559 at the royal court of Henry II of France. The novel recreates that era with remarkable precision. Nearly every character – except the heroine – is a historical figure. Events and intrigues unfold with great faithfulness to documentary record. In the United Kingdom the historical novel "appears to have developed" from La Princesse de Clèves, "and then via the Gothic novel".[9]

In the 20th century György Lukács argued that Scott was the first fiction writer who saw history not just as a convenient frame in which to stage a contemporary narrative, but rather as a distinct social and cultural setting.[15] Scott's Scottish novels such as Waverley (1814) and Rob Roy (1817) focused upon a middling character who sits at the intersection of various social groups in order to explore the development of society through conflict.[16]Ivanhoe (1820) gained credit for renewing interest in the Middle Ages.

In French literature, the most prominent inheritor of Scott's style of the historical novel was Balzac.[22] In 1829 Balzac published Les Chouans, a historical work in the manner of Sir Walter Scott.[23] This was subsequently incorporated into La Comédie Humaine. The bulk La Comédie Humaine, however, takes place during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy, though there are several novels which take place during the French Revolution and others which take place of in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, including About Catherine de Medici and The Elixir of Long Life. Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) furnishes another 19th-century example of the romantic-historical novel. Victor Hugo began writing The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in 1829, largely to make his contemporaries more aware of the value of the Gothic architecture, which was neglected and often destroyed to be replaced by new buildings, or defaced by replacement of parts of buildings in a newer style.[24] The action takes place in 1482 and the title refers to the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, on which the story is centred. Alexandre Dumas also wrote several popular historical fiction novels, including The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. George Saintsbury stated: "Monte Cristo is said to have been at its first appearance, and for some time subsequently, the most popular book in Europe."[25] This popularity has extended into modern times as well. The book was "translated into virtually all modern languages and has never been out of print in most of them. There have been at least twenty-nine motion pictures based on it ... as well as several television series, and many movies [have] worked the name 'Monte Cristo' into their titles."[26]

Tolstoy's War and Peace offers an example of 19th-century historical fiction used to critique contemporary history. Tolstoy read the standard histories available in Russian and French about the Napoleonic Wars, and used the novel to challenge those historical approaches. At the start of the novel's third volume he describes his work as blurring the line between fiction and history, in order to get closer to the truth.[27] The novel is set 60 years before it was composed, and alongside researching the war through primary and secondary sources, he spoke with people who had lived through war during the French invasion of Russia in 1812; thus, the book is also, in part, ethnography fictionalized.[27]

The Betrothed (1827) by Alessandro Manzoni, It has been called the most famous and widely read novel of the Italian language.[28]The Betrothed was inspired by Walter Scott's Ivanhoe but, compared to its model, shows some innovations (two member of the lower class as principal characters, the past described without romantic idealization, an explicitly Christian message), somehow forerunning the realistic novel of the following decades.[29] Set in northern Italy in 1628, during the oppressive years under Spanish rule, it is sometimes seen as a veiled attack on Austria, which controlled the region at the time the novel was written.

The critical and popular success of The betrothed gave rise to a crowd of imitations and, in the age of unification, almost every Italian writer tried his hand at the genre; novels now almost forgotten, like Marco Visconti by Tommaso Grossi (Manzoni’s best friend) or Ettore Fieramosca by Massimo D’Azeglio (Manzoni’s son in law), were the best-sellers of their time. Many of these authors (like Niccolò Tommaseo, Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi and D’Azeglio himself) were patriots and politicians too, and in their novels the veiled politic message of Manzoni became explicit (the hero of Ettore Fieramosca fights to defend the honor of the Italian soldiers, mocked by some arrogant Frenchmen). Unfortunately, in them the narrative talent not equaled the patriotic passion, and their novels, full of rhetoric and melodramatic excesses, are today barely readable as historical documents. A significant exception is The confessions of an Italian by Ippolito Nievo, an epic fresco about the old Venetian republic's fall and the Napoleonic age, told with satiric irony and youthful brio (Nievo wrote it when he was 26 years old, before his premature death).

A major 20th-century example of this genre is the German author Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901). This chronicles the decline of a wealthy north German merchant family over the course of four generations, incidentally portraying the manner of life and mores of the Hanseaticbourgeoisie in the years from 1835 to 1877. Mann drew deeply from the history of his own family, the Mann family of Lübeck, and their milieu. This was Mann's first novel, and with the publication of the 2nd edition in 1903, Buddenbrooks became a major literary success. The work led to a Nobel Prize in Literature for Mann in 1929; although the Nobel award generally recognises an author's body of work, the Swedish Academy's citation for Mann identified "his great novel Buddenbrooks" as the principal reason for his prize.[30] Mann also wrote, between 1926 and 1943, a four-part novel Joseph and His Brothers. In it Mann retells the familiar biblical stories of Genesis, from Jacob to Joseph (chapters 27–50), setting it in the historical context of the reign of Akhenaten (1353–1336 BC) in ancient Egypt.

Fani Popova–Mutafova (1902-1977) was a Bulgarian author who is considered by many to have been the best-selling Bulgarian historical fiction author ever.[31] Her books sold in record numbers in the 1930s and the early 1940s.[31] However, she was eventually sentenced to seven years of imprisonment by the Bulgarian communist regime because of some of her writings celebrating Hitler, and though released after only eleven months for health reasons, was forbidden to publish anything between 1943 and 1972.[32]

Robert Graves of Britain wrote several popular historical novels, including I, Claudius, King Jesus, The Golden Fleece and Count Belisarius. Other significant British novelists include Georgette Heyer, Naomi Mitchison, and Mary Renault. Heyer essentially established the historical romance genre and its subgenre Regency romance, which was inspired by Jane Austen. To ensure accuracy, Heyer collected reference works and kept detailed notes on all aspects of Regency life. While some critics thought the novels were too detailed, others considered the level of detail to be Heyer's greatest asset; Heyer even recreated William the Conqueror's crossing into England for her novel The Conqueror. Naomi Mitchison's finest novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) is regarded by some as the best historical novel of the 20th century.[33] Mary Renault is best known for her historical novels set in Ancient Greece. In addition to vivid fictional portrayals of Theseus, Socrates, Plato and Alexander the Great, she wrote a non-fiction biography of Alexander. The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) by J. G. Farrell has been described as an "outstanding novel".[34] Inspired by events such as the sieges of Cawnpore and Lucknow, the book details the siege of a fictional Indian town, Krishnapur, during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 from the perspective of the British residents. The main characters find themselves subject to the increasing strictures and deprivation of the siege, which reverses the "normal" structure of life where Europeans govern Asian subjects. The absurdity of the class system in a town no one can leave becomes a source of comic invention, though the text is serious in intent and tone.

In 1980, Umberto Eco achieved international success with The name of the rose, a novel set in an Italian abbey in 1327 and readable both as a historical mystery, as an allegory of the Italy in the “plumber years” and as an erudite joke. The Eco’s example, like the one of Manzoni before it, relaunched the interest of Italian public and writers for the genre and many novelists who till then had cultivated the contemporary novel, turned their hand to the stories set in the far centuries. So it was for Fulvio Tomizza (The evil coming from North, about the Reformation), Dacia Maraini (The silent duchess, about the female condition in the Eighteenth century) and Sebastiano Vassalli (The chimera, about the witch hunt). Among the writers emerged in the last years, Ernesto Ferrero (N) and Valerio Manfredi (The last legion) worth a mention.

The Marxist literary critic, essayist, and social theorist György Lukács wrote extensively on the aesthetic and political significance of the historical novel. In 1937's Der historische Roman, published originally in Russian, Lukács developed critical readings of several historical novels by various authors, including Gottfried Keller, Charles Dickens, and Gustave Flaubert. He interprets the advent of the "genuinely" historical novel at the beginning of the 19th century in terms of two developments, or processes. The first is the development of a specific genre in a specific medium—the historical novel's unique stylistic and narrative elements. The second is the development of a representative, organic artwork that can capture the fractures, contradictions, and problems of the particular productive mode of its time (i.e., developing, early, entrenched capitalism).

A 20th-century variant of the historical novel is documentary fiction, which incorporates "not only historical characters and events, but also reports of everyday events" found in contemporary newspapers.[39] Examples of this variant form of historical novel include U.S.A. (1938), and Ragtime (1975) by E.L. Doctorow.[40]

Historical mysteries or "historical whodunits" are set by their authors in the distant past, with a plot that which involves the solving of a mystery or crime (usually murder). Though works combining these genres have existed since at least the early 1900s, many credit Ellis Peters's Cadfael Chronicles (1977–1994) with popularizing them. These are set between 1137 and 1145 A.D.[41][42] The increasing popularity of this type of fiction in subsequent decades has created a distinct subgenre recognized by both publishers and libraries.[42][43][44][45]

Romantic themes have also been portrayed, such as Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. One of the first popular historical romances appeared in 1921, when Georgette Heyer published The Black Moth, which is set in 1751. It was not until 1935 that she wrote the first of her signature Regency novels, set around the English Regency period (1811–1820), when the Prince Regent ruled England in place of his ill father, George III. Heyer's Regency novels were inspired by Jane Austen's novels of the late 18th and early 19th century. Because Heyer's writing was set in the midst of events that had occurred over 100 years previously, she included authentic period detail in order for her readers to understand.[46] Where Heyer referred to historical events, it was as background detail to set the period, and did not usually play a key role in the narrative. Heyer's characters often contained more modern-day sensibilities, and more conventional characters in the novels would point out the heroine's eccentricities, such as wanting to marry for love.[47]

A prominent subgenre within historical fiction is the Children's historical novel. Often following a pedagogical bent, children's historical fiction may follow the conventions of many of the other subgenres of historical fiction. A number of such works include elements of historical fantasy or time travel to facilitate the transition between the contemporary world and the past in the tradition of children's portal fiction. Sometimes publishers will commission series of historical novels that explore different periods and times. Among the most popular contemporary series include the American Girl novels and the Magic Tree House series. A prominent award within Children's historical fiction is the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction.

More recently British dramatist Howard Brenton has written several histories. He gained notoriety for his play The Romans in Britain, first staged at the National Theatre in October 1980, which drew parallels between the Roman invasion of Britain in 54BC and the contemporary British military presence in Northern Ireland. Its concerns with politics were, however, overshadowed by controversy surrounding a rape scene. Brenton also wrote Anne Boleyn a play on the life of Anne Boleyn, which premiered at Shakespeare's Globe in 2010. Anne Boleyn is portrayed as a significant force in the political and religious in-fighting at court and a furtherer of the cause of Protestantism in her enthusiasm for the Tyndale Bible.[53]

One of the first operas to use historical events and people is Claudio Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea, which was first performed in Venice during the 1643 carnival season. it describes how Poppaea, mistress of the Roman emperor Nero, is able to achieve her ambition and be crowned empress. The opera was revived in Naples in 1651, but was then neglected until the rediscovery of the score in 1888, after which it became the subject of scholarly attention in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since the 1960s, the opera has been performed and recorded many times. George Frederick Handel also wrote several operas based on historical characters, including Giulio Cesare (1724), Tamerlano (1724) and Rodelinda (1725).

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